Freedom for Women: Forging the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1953–1970 by Carol Giardina (review)

This narrative of the emergence of the radical feminist movement joins a growing scholarship that is reassessing the history of women’s liberation, especially its racial politics. Giardina was a founding member of Gainesville Women’s Liberation, and she draws on her own experiences and connections to ground this synthetic account of the creation of the women’s liberation movement (WLM).

Giardina supplements published sources with interviews and limited archival research to offer three critical arguments. First, she asserts that women’s liberation belongs not to the 1970s where it is often situated, but was a sixties movement and must be understood as part of the radical movements of that decade. Second, she rejects the “false image” of WLM “as the concern of white, affluent women” (3). Not only were women of color involved from the beginning, but their influence was such that referring to separate “feminisms,” as have some scholars, is misleading. Third, she emphasizes that, contrary to some other interpretations, the “pioneers” of WLM did not decide to organize a movement out of their anger at the sexism of the civil rights, New Left and Black Power movements. Instead, Giardina stresses that those movements offered radical women material, ideological and personal resources and support, providing a space that was more free than the broader society. Thus, she seeks to redirect attention from the undeniable sexism that existed within sixties movements to the opportunities that those movements created for the young women who worked within them.

Giardina focuses on a diverse group of individuals who were primed by family history as well as experience within radical movements to become the founders of WLM. Many of these are familiar characters although some, such as Gainesville activist Judith Brown, SNCC member Frances Beal and Planned Parenthood volunteer Patricia Robinson, have been less discussed. While most of her attention is dedicated to WLM leaders, she also addresses the movement’s growth, attributing it to two ideas: the necessity of collective action among women embodied in the slogan “sisterhood is powerful,” and consciousness-raising. Her account highlights the generation of these ideas in conversations between activists in letters and at meetings and conferences, occasionally shedding useful light on behind-the-scenes conflict and cooperation.

Giardina’s account is accessible and is particularly useful for its inclusion of a broad range of African American women as antecedents and contributors to the ferment about feminism in the late 1960s, which despite the book’s subtitle is its true chronological focus. However, the author has created something of a straw person, positing a supposedly dominant simplistic view of the women’s movement that, in fact, has been eclipsed by recent studies by authors such as Anne Enke, Jennifer Nelson, Becky Thompson, and Anne Valk. While some of these works may have appeared late in this book’s production, many did not and are inexplicably missing from the bibliography and footnotes. Giardina’s book is not out-of-step with these more fine-grained and well-researched monographs, but its failure to grapple with them limits its significance.